Possible constructor search optimization

[andrewdep]

Since JS Maps and Sets support objects for keys, I'm wondering if you've done any benchmarking to see if using a Map instead of a linear array search using an iterator would optimize this code:

  itemToSia(item, constructor) {
    for (const entry of this.constructors) {
      if (entry.constructor === constructor) {
        return {
          code: entry.code,
          args: entry.args(item),
        };
      }
    }
    throw `Serialization of item ${item} is not supported`;
  }

What I'm thinking is populating the map up front using the constructor property as a key and having the entry be the value, then changing the above code to something like this:

  itemToSia(item, constructor) {
    const entry = this.constructors.get(constructor);
    if (entry) {
      return {
        code: entry.code,
        args: entry.args(item),
      };
    }
    throw `Serialization of item ${item} is not supported`;
  }

I ask because in our project we are up to around 20 custom constructors. I imagine there is a chance this won't be an optimization depending on modern javascript compilers, but technically the of is creating iterator objects every time, along with the fact that iterators return short lived objects for every element iterated (though, again, modern compilers may optimize this away), and its possible that for small Maps iterating is indeed faster than a Map lookup, but I would be curious what benchmarking shows?

[CEbbinghaus]

I have found with large datasets that the

for(let i = 0; i < arr.length; ++i) {
	const data = arr[i];
}

is fastest when iterating objects. However, the question in this issue would be how JS evaluates objects as keys and wether that is faster. It would be worth to run a few benchmarks and see

[c7x43t]

It would be possible to do:

// replace
this.constructors = constructors;
// with
this.constructors = new Map(constructors.map(constructor=>[constructor.constructor,constructor]));
// in Sia:
itemToSia(item, constructor) {
	let entry = this.constructors(constructor);
	if(entry){
		return {
			code: entry.code,
			args: entry.args(item),
		};
	}
	throw `Serialization of item ${item} is not supported`;
}

[pouya-eghbali]

These are all great ideas; I will benchmark these and get the best solution into the code. I'm building a big project on this, so I will be working on it more often :) Thank you all for your active interest and help! I merged the pull requests and made a new minor release.